From the Editor

ByStephen J. Berry |December 5, 2017

I, as co-founder of IowaWatch.org, would like to congratulate you, the members of the IowaWatch family. Thanks to your past support, IowaWatch’s journalistic success had earned for us a chance to receive up to $28,000 in matching funds from a $3 million national News Match 2017 fund drive.

ByLindsey Drilling |September 21, 2015

IowaWatch board member Bob Walker and his wife, Kristy, are inviting the public to a fundraiser and silent auction they will host at their home west of Iowa City to raise funds for the non-profit Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism. The event will be on Thursday, Oct. 22, from 6 to 10 p.m. at the Walker Homestead, 3913 James Ave. SW. The event will include wine and cheese and wood-fired pizza catered by Provender.

ByIowaWatch |August 21, 2015

Register now for the IowaWatch annual banquet. First Amendment expert and educator Ken Paulson will be the guest speaker at the third annual Celebrating a Free Press and Open Government Banquet, titled this year “Journalism’s Core…The Contemporary First Amendment.

ByIowaWatch |July 8, 2015

Do you like what you see from IowaWatch.org? If so, the Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism seeks your financial assistance to maintain the high level of investigative and community affairs journalism it does while training college students to do this work at a high level.

ByJim Malewitz/Special to IowaWatch |May 28, 2015

It started with a short news clip. On October 12, 2009, The Daily Iowan ran a 244-word brief saying that University of Iowa business student Jacques Similhomme, missing for two weeks, had been found dead in the Cedar River. I hadn’t heard Similhomme was missing, and that seemed strange since he was a fellow Hawkeye. Even more bizarre, his death was buried deep inside the university’s newspaper. I recalled an incident in September 2006 while I was a student at Grinnell College.

ByIowaWatch |April 20, 2015

The IowaWatch Connection radio program collected six awards for large market radio reporting at the 2015 Iowa Broadcast News Association convention in Johnston, Iowa, on April 18. Each week program host and producer Jeff Stein examines an IowaWatch story in depth during the 23-minute program. The program’s winning entries were:

First place: Farm and Business reporting, for a report on farm safety that included reporting from Sarah Hadley. First place: Political coverage, for a compilation of reports related to politics. First place: In-depth/series, for a report on student debt that students from several college journalism programs in Iowa helped compile.

ByIowaWatch |October 3, 2014

Two longtime Iowa journalists — Brian Cooper, editor of The Telegraph Herald in Dubuque, and First Amendment advocate Michael Gartner, owner of the Iowa Cubs baseball team — were honored by the Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism-IowaWatch Thursday, Oct. 2, with Free Press Champion Awards. The awards are for their efforts promoting and showing by example the benefits of transparent government in Iowa.

ByIowaWatch |June 19, 2014

Jay Capron, host of Your Town on KXIC radio, AM 800, featured on Tuesday, June 17, the IowaWatch story on the emergence of cellulosic ethanol, or trashanol, whole also giving a mention to the original IowaWatch documentary, “Breaking the Cycle: Meth Addiction in the Heartland”. Gabriella Dunn, the IowaWatch reporter who wrote the trashanol story, and IowaWatch Executive Director-Editor Lyle Muller were Capron’s guests. You can listen to KXIC’s podcast below. Your Town features IowaWatch the third Tuesday of every month. Advertising with this podcast is KXIC’s and does not support IowaWatch.

ByIowaWatch |June 17, 2014

Lisa Rossi, news editor for the American Journalism Review (AJR) and a faculty member at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, has joined the Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism board of directors. AJR is an online publication that covers innovation in media. Rossi, a University of Iowa graduate, has worked at the Des Moines Register, The Gazette, Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, The Missoulian and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and at The Daily Iowan, where she served as a metro editor. She was an associate regional editor for Patch.com in Maryland before joining AJR, managing writers, editing stories and developing strategies to grow online audiences.

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The Iowa Center’s mission is to maintain an independent, non-partisan journalistic program dedicated to producing and encouraging explanatory and investigative journalism in Iowa, engaging in collaborative reporting efforts with Iowa news organizations and educating journalism students. Read More »

Investigative Reporting in Iowa

University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics held its November 2016 open house at the Stead Family Children's Hospital despite no documented evidence of State Fire Marshal approval and as an engineer report showed hundreds of fire protection and life-safety code requirement shortcomings, The Gazette learned in an investigation.